Comments on: Cronon, Chomsky/Foucault, & public reasonhttp://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2011/03/29/cronon-chomskyfoucault-public-reason/
ecoculture, geophilosophy, mediapoliticsThu, 30 Jul 2015 17:21:37 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3By: Smith Goldenhttp://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2011/03/29/cronon-chomskyfoucault-public-reason/#comment-15899
Wed, 20 Apr 2011 15:49:30 +0000http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/?p=3133#comment-15899Love your blog. Please notice that the pathway which can lead human to escape from this climate change catastrophe is revealed in details for the first time at http://www.Crisis2Peace.org.
]]>By: David M. Granthttp://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2011/03/29/cronon-chomskyfoucault-public-reason/#comment-13563
Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:50:01 +0000http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/?p=3133#comment-13563Good meditation on this issue. One of my regrets is not having the time to take Cronon’s courses at UW (he wants you to take two in sequence, something my ad hoc minor couldn’t make room for, though I did have the absolute toughest course ever with Leila Harris, a colleague of his in Geography). But I have admired his work for some time.

I often wonder about the dictates of public employees to not engage in partisan issues. We are always partisan, even historians like Cronon. And, we have specialties of research and knowledge, even historians like Cronon. When these merge, coincide, connect, or link with each other, we find what I think is part of the “Wisconsin Idea” — that the university is there to support ordinary citizens with the whole of participatory democracy. Naturally, this will have partisan elements, but that doesn’t mean it or its participants will be *exclusively* partisan. Rather, like any quality academic exchange, there will be listening, examination of ideas, refutation of evidence, historical contextualizing, etc. What I see from the Walker administration/ WI GOP and many in public politics in general (at both the micro and macro levels) is a frenzied attack in the name of unrealistic ideals of objectivity, false histories, and imaginative futures. Yet, these are posited as “reasonable deliberation” and are difficult to undermine given the poststructuralist turn.

This is a troubling aspect to me. Local news today is about a token few who are upset about Michelle Obama giving our commencement address. Anyone who is seen as partisan (and the other partisan side is SO easy to spot!) is condemned and vilified. A refutation on the grounds of reason entraps the refuter as being just as partisan and just as easily dismissed.

Sorry, this is turning into my own mini-blog, but I wonder if the non-partisan rule is past it’s prime and the potential of aesthetics as a means to response. Perhaps an aesthetic response to a “reasonable” argument gets beyond both of these things, following what have been called “singular rhythms”?